August 1939. Shimmering heat in Central Europe. The grain is mowed. Holiday season. It might be carefree days, but there's something disturbing in the air. Some say a new war is imminent. The others swear the peace is safe. In this restless August, the world is watching the Obersalzberg. Adolf Hitler spends his summer here. From here he dares a risky game. Hauke Friederichs tells the story of...

His profile was posted publicly in the county seat when Johann Schulz sought refuge with relatives in a Rhenish-Hessian village. He is accused of killing a police officer at a demonstration. The bounty offered becomes a temptation for the villagers, and it is a matter of opinion who finally denounces the cop killer. Because the Nazis advertise in the village.

Feuchtwanger's world-famous family novel They are successful and respected: Gustav, the writer and senior boss, Martin, the businessman, and Edgar, the doctor. But then the unbelievable happened: The Nazis set up their regime with murder and fire. Home is slipping away from the Oppermanns. They have to leave their homes and their friends because they are of Jewish descent.

This novel is set in Paris, the city that became a place of exile for thousands of German refugees. In the spring of 1935, Friedrich Benjamin, a well-known publicist and editor of a German émigré newspaper, was kidnapped by the Nazis. Sepp Trautwein, the music professor and composer expelled from his Munich teaching post, gives up music in order to make Benjamin's cause his own. He fights an...

There are often curious, sometimes unbelievable stories behind our terms, idioms and proverbs. Here you learn how the bloody events of the American Civil War gave us the dreaded deadlines, why we speak of butterflies in the stomach when we mean love, and why one should absolutely avoid bringing something to the trapeze.

Dietmar Schultke's meticulously researched depiction of the inner-German border and the Berlin Wall contains all relevant information about the bulwark between the two German states, which has been developed into a perfect barrier belt, and the GDR border regime, a time table and selected orders to the border troops of the GDR.

When Toni Muhr returned to Vienna from the war in the fall of 1916, Emperor Franz Joseph I was being ceremonially buried. Toni's world seems to be getting out of joint in other respects too: his employer quite obviously applied for the chemical patent himself, which he had offered him for sale in vain shortly before he was drafted into military service, and thus made incredible wealth during...

Berlin is poor but sexy? Vienna, on the other hand, is leisurely, tradition-conscious and a little morbid? The two great cities have always been compared – and often passionately competed with each other. Especially in the first half of the 20th century, the time of classic modernism, the two metropolises attracted artists, actors and eccentrics of all kinds, who at times could hardly decide...

The Brothers Grimm 'watched the people in the mouth' and faithfully wrote down what the fairytale woman said. This is how many people imagine fairy tales to be. It wasn't like that. The Grimms often intervened radically in the texts, smoothed them out, rebuilt them and expanded them.

'This is the story of the musician Johannes Elias Alder, who at the age of twenty-two committed his life to death after deciding not to sleep any longer.' – With his debut novel about the life and death of a musical genius in an Austrian mountain village, Robert Schneider succeeded sensational world success, which was translated into over 30 languages, successfully filmed and became a...

Traveling with the privy councilor is a very special pleasure. In September 1786, Johann Wolfgang Goethe - 37 years old and bored with his ministerial life - set off south. It goes over the Brenner Pass and to Lake Garda, via Verona to Venice, further via Bologna, Rome and Naples to Sicily. The Italian Journey is one of the most famous travelogues in literary history, but it is also a book...

Stefan Zweig, European and citizen of the world, cosmopolitan and pacifist, talks about his lost life, from his childhood and youth in Vienna to the time of the First World War and the 1930s, when the shadow of fascism lay over Europe. He describes how it once was and how it will never be again, in passionate, evocative prose. It is the story of an entire generation and a portrait of an epoch...